Reply to Does this make me classist or (shudder!) racist?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yes, it makes you racist and little ignorant. Do you care that a teacher from Boston does not pronounce their r's? No. Because when white people don't pronounce things correctly it is cute when black people do it, [b]you [/b]think they are uneducated.[/quote]

NP here. I have no problem whatsoever with aks, but I am seriously put off with Boston (and Brooklyn) accents which butcher the english language. What does this make me?[/quote]

It makes you narrow minded.[/quote]

Any regional dialect tends to make a person sound uneducated.  That may not be a fair assessment, but it's a generalization people make about how we speak.

A boss once told me to add 10 points to the IQ of anyone from West Texas, and to subtract 10 points from the IQ of anyone from England.[/quote]

No, SOME regional dialects tend to make a person sound uneducated -- specifically, the dialects from the lower-status parts of a society/country. And OTHER regional dialects tend to make a person sound educated. You say so yourself, in your post.

And, strictly speaking, it's not that they make the person sound uneducated, it's that [i]we perceive [/i]the person as sounding uneducated. This is something we do, and therefore it's something that we can try to stop doing.[/quote]

I think that a strong regional dialect makes it seem like you haven't had a chance to get out of your area much, or like you aren't making the effort to speak in a mainstream way.

I came from a part of the country with a heavy accent, and I have proactively toned my accent way down since coming to DC.  It's pretty easy to change how you speak.  If someone wants to change it, they can.  Same for saying "aks."  You can be disciplined and train yourself to say "ask."  [/quote]

Exactly.  People should "axe not what their country can do for you, but what you can do for yourself!"[/quote]

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